This application seeks a renewal of our previously AHRQ-funded Shaw University M-RISP Minority Elderly Research (SUMMER) Center. The basis of the initial AHRQ M-RISP application was to augment the research infrastructure at Shaw University, the oldest Historically Black College/University (HBCU) in the South, located in Raleigh, North Carolina. The goal of the SUMMER Center was, and will continue to be, to establish infrastructure support to Shaw University junior-level faculty to conduct health services research on racial disparities among various minority populations by providing training, resources, and mentorship opportunities through collaborative linkages with senior researchers at Shaw and at other universities. The SUMMER Center combined ongoing quality health services research, faculty development, and student training in an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to meet the broad objectives of AHRQ M-RISP, which are, in part, to help minority institutions and their faculty conduct health services research with respect to the elimination of racial health disparities and to support improvements in health outcomes, strengthen quality measurement and improvement, identify strategies to improve access, foster appropriate use overall, and reduce unnecessary expenditures. The SUMMER Center also directly supported Healthy People 2010, in part, through its focus on the elimination of racial disparities in health. [unreadable] [unreadable] Specifically, the two components of the SUMMER Center were, and will continue to be: (1) to establish institutional infrastructure support for research development to strengthen and enhance the capability of Shaw faculty members to undertake health services research; and (2) to support individual investigator research projects focused on the elimination of health disparities which will, in turn, lead to increases in health knowledge and will form the basis for Shaw faculty to become more competitive in extramural research. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]